Architecture's Progressive Imperative: Housing Betterment in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Abstract

History has shown that architects can act as catalysts for significant leaps forward in housing provision. Far beyond pure aesthetics and building layouts, their visions for new ways of offering affordable dwellings have driven real social change, with innovations in both the form of the domestic built environment and the methods used to construct and deliver it. Matthew Gordon Lasner, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), tells the story – from the conception of planned garden suburbs and multi‐family city blocks, to prefabricated postwar social housing schemes and more recent resident‐architect collaborations.